ESL One Gives Broadcasting Rights To Facebook For 2018

ESL, an esports tournament organizer, dealt its broadcasting rights to social media giant, Facebook for its entire series of tournaments. This includes Dota 2 and CS:GO for the year 2018.

What means is that the go-to esports live streaming site, Twitch, will not have ESL-official channels for the ESL Pro League and other ESL-organized tournaments. Notably, the ongoing Dota 2 minor tournament, ESL One Genting will be the first event to take place under the new streaming deal and fans were not happy with the change.

ESL and controversies

Fans took their grievances to Reddit and the complaints include issues with watching on mobile devices, the low video quality on Facebook, broadcast delays and technical issues, and of course the inability to chat live with their co-viewers. These issues were completely avoided using Twitch and in that case, several streamers and Dota 2 personalities took matters into their hands by streaming the tournament on their channels through DotaTV in the Dota 2 client.

On the second day of the tournament, the qualifying stage for the playoffs happening on the weekend, ESL somehow found the channels broadcasting the games through Twitch and banned the channels from the live streaming website. Apparently, Valve allowed broadcasting tournament games through Twitch with the condition of disallowing “monetizing content”. To be specific, streamers cannot accept and make money off their channel while broadcasting the tournament. One of the banned Twitch streamers, BananaSlamJamma received and accepted donations during his stream. There are no details on how ESL, Valve, and Twitch acted out the bans though.

Facebook as the next gaming center?

ESL stated that they dealt the rights to Facebook to venture out new and broader viewers. Apparently, the social media giant has new viewing experience features such as Facebook Watch and the integration of VR into live streaming. So, it seems that ESL is gambling on Facebook’s future and its big audiences. Will Facebook be considered as the next hub for esports content or will this partnership be a bust? We will find out more in the coming days and unfortunately, we will watch the ESL CS:GO Pro League on Facebook, as it is the next ESL-organized tournament lined up.